In general, flake products having warp surface, especially those which are small in size and light in weight require lots of labor to carry out operations of orientation, feeding, and packaging because of their warp and irregular shapes. Take the mass production of potato chips for example. The conventional method of production is to employ a lot of labor to perform product orientation before the packaging process. As shown in FIG. 1, the potato chips become irregular shapes ( as shown in FIG. 2) after preprocessing 1, and these warp flakes on the metal mesh conveyer 2, which are easily swayed in transverse direction such that they result in their deviating from the tracks of metal mesh conveyer, are to be arranged and conveyed with their concave surfaces facing upward, at this moment, workers 9 are needed on both sides of the rear section of the metal mesh conveyer 2 to check and rearrange the deviated flakes. As the flakes fall over from conveyer 3 which has a elevation difference comparing with conveyer 2, by the use of the tangential velocity at the rear end of the metal mesh conveyer 2 and the elevation difference, they are turned over with their concave surfaces facing downward, but since not all of the flakes conveyed on the metal mesh conveyer are axially parallel to their advancing direction which causes part of the flakes being not turned over, thereby, workers 9 are also needed on both sides of the conveyer 3 to assist the turnover and orientation works; thereafter, in order to complete the orientation works, the flakes are conveyed into vibrating plate 4 and are stacked up by means of vibration, but some of the flakes climb up during the stack-up process, therefore, workers 9 are again needed to rearrange them in a front-to-rear stack-up mode, besides, workers 9 are also needed at the rear end of the vibrating plate 4 to move the stack-up flakes to conveyers 5 and 6 respectively and the partition pins are used to measure the number of flakes for each of the small stack of flakes to be conveyed to the packaging machines 7 to facilitate the packaging operation. This kind of operation mode is not economical under the condition of continuous mass production since the cost of employed labor is significant.
For these reasons, the inventors, through years of working experience with continuous studies and designs, finally developed an automated separating and packaging system that can perform orientating, stack-up, separating and merging processes to effectively improve the shortcoming of high labor cost and greatly elevates the production efficiency.